While on a once-in-a-lifetime 30-year anniversary trip to Vienna, Austria, I noticed all the beautiful machine cranes around the city. I remembered how I would always say to my children, as we drove past construction sites with cranes, “Look at the flock of cranes.”

I thought, what if I wrote a story about bird cranes and machine cranes, showcasing a few similarities between them?? Like a blue crane bird and a blue machine crane.

I came up with a cute concept and then reached out to the amazing artist Ninnani. As a co-creative director, they took the story to a whole new level. They came up with the idea of two children looking through spyglasses, and that worked perfectly along the original idea and contributed to visually shaping the story. Their out-of-this-world watercolor images will have you falling in love with bird and machine cranes.